“Yes, no, I can’t remember—­”

Varick put his hand over his eyes, as if trying to shut out some dreadful sight.  Then he groped his way to a chair, and sat down heavily.

“I say, Varick, I am sorry.”

Dr. Panton looked really concerned.  “We’ve been thinking so much of Miss Bubbles and of her rescuer that we have forgotten you!” he exclaimed.

Their host leant forward; he buried his face in his hands.  “I shall never forget it—­never,” he muttered brokenly.  “The horror that seized me—­the awful feeling that I could do nothing—­nothing!  I felt so absolutely distraught that I seemed to see myself, not Bubbles, floating down there—­on the surface of the water.”

He looked up, and they were all, even Tapster, painfully impressed by his look of retrospective horror.  Dr. Panton told himself that Lionel Varick was an even more sensitive man than he had hitherto known him to be.

CHAPTER XVII

Dinner was to be half an hour later than usual, and Dr. Panton, as he went off to his comfortable, warm room, felt pleasantly, healthily tired.

He had gone in to see his patients for a moment on his way upstairs, and they were both going on well.  Bubbles was beginning to look her own queer, elfish little self again.  She was curiously apathetic, as people so often are after any kind of shock, but it was clear that there were to be no bad after-effects of the accident.  As for Donnington, the young man declared that he felt quite all right, and he was even anxious to get up for dinner.  But that, of course, could not be allowed.

“All’s well that ends well,” muttered the doctor, as he threw himself for a moment into a chair drawn up invitingly before the fire.

He did go on to tell himself, however, that he now felt a little concerned over Lionel Varick.  Varick now looked far more really ill than did either Bubbles or Bill Donnington.

The doctor recalled a certain terrible day, rather over a year ago, when Varick had broken down utterly!  It was the afternoon that poor Milly was being put into her coffin; and, by sheer good luck he, Panton, happened to call in.  He had found Varick sitting alone, looking very desolate, in the dining-room of the commonplace little villa, while from overhead there came the sounds of heavy feet moving this way and that.

All at once there had come a loud knock at the front door, and Varick, starting up, had uttered a fearful cry.  Then, sitting down again, he had begun trembling, as if he had the ague.  He, Panton, had been so concerned at the poor fellow’s condition that he had insisted, there and then, on taking him along to his own house, and he had kept him there as his guest till the day of Mrs. Varick’s funeral.

As these memories came crowding on him, the door of his room opened quietly, and the man who was filling his mind walked in.